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When Does Tourism Raise Land Prices? Threshold Effects, Superstar Cities, and Policy Lessons from Japan
Mingzhi Xiao, Takara Sakai, Daisuke Murakami, Yuki Takayama
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04307

When Does Tourism Raise Land Prices? Threshold Effects, Superstar Cities, and Policy Lessons from Japan
While tourism is widely regarded as a catalyst for economic and urban transformation, its effects on land prices remain contested. This study examines tourism and land prices using a panel of 1,724 Japanese municipalities from 2021 to 2024, with annual tourist arrivals as a proxy for tourism activity. Using mediation analysis and panel threshold regression, we show that sizable land price increases are concentrated in a small group of "superstar" cities, specifically those in the top 5.9 percen…